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milt's blog

Improving Your Video Editing

Tue, 12/14/2010 - 10:48pm — milt

book cover The Invisible CutIf you hope to improve your video editing skills, you might want to check out a book I read recently:  The Invisible Cut (How Editors Make Magic) by Bobbie O'Steen (ISBN 978-1-932907-53-7) available at Amazon or perhaps your local library.

O'Steen provides an effective demonstration of the methodology and thinking of how several Hollywood editors of various movie genre managed to  editor their good and sometimes bad film clips into award winning feature films. She does this by first discussing the how's and why's of good film editing and then reviews examples of these principles through the use of selected film scenes from nine great movies. Well maybe eight if them were great, IMHO.

Which camera should I take?

Fri, 12/10/2010 - 6:27pm — milt

Greetings camera people.

As you might know, I have three cameras. Two still and one video. I recently gained the third by buying a new body to replace my old Minolta 7000 film body. Maury questioned this move, saying why are you buying a Sony? The reason was that I had two good lens's that each cost me originally more than the film body. In order to use these two A-mount lenses, I bought a Sony Alpha 550 for $550. (Now I could have bought a A-580 for $300 more that would also shoot full HD video, but that's another story.)
 
I'm going to Houston for Christmas on a short in and out trip. My wife and I have a desire to minimize luggage to a carry-on, and a back-pack/purse each. I had to make a limited choice to one camera. 

Re-creating the Normandy D-Day Invasion

Mon, 09/21/2009 - 11:24pm — milt

How would you recreate the massive Normandy D-Day assault on Omaha Beach with three actors, a green screen, some old military gear and sophisticated editing software?

The Most Complicated Video Software Ever (And the most powerful!)

Mon, 07/27/2009 - 4:05pm — milt

I have put together a travel video featuring the nine waterfalls we could get to in Oregon in late May and Crater Lake. Access was limited by retained snow that hadn't been plwed or melted yet. We chose to go in May to insure that there was enough water flow to make the falls impressive. Wrong! Too early. Wait until July or August.

The sequencing of the various clips is completed and the features needed are better sound editing and an impressive opening title sequence. For that latter purpose I turned to Adobe After Efects CS4. I had bought two books among the few supporting After Effects; Adobe After Effects CS4 Classroom In A Book (CIAB) and Peachpit Press After Effects CS4 Visual Quickpro Guide .

The Complexity of Good Software

Tue, 03/24/2009 - 9:50am — milt

Over the years I've progressed from MS-DOS, Paint, and Visicalc on an Apple II in 1980 to Adobe CS3/4, Office 2003 and a multiple of other apps, some costly and some freeware on a 32 bit Vista Quad CPU desktop today. So what has been the result of this tremendous increase in capability?

Homemade steadycam

Thu, 02/26/2009 - 2:57pm — milt

Having a wide two handed grip is supposed to result in smooth camera movement. Based on the home made steadicam site I found on the web, I decided to build something similar for my Canon HV-30. The videocam shown on the site was much larger (and costly) than mine so I tried to make mine to match the HV-30 size but be lighter. The construction is all 3/4" PVC and mine is a combination of schedule 40 for stiffness and schedule 2000 for lightness.

 

HDV Efforts; Blu-Ray Progress

Tue, 02/17/2009 - 4:44pm — milt

Whether you have Adobe Premiere Elements 4 or Premiere Pro CS3, if you shoot a  HDVtape and load it on to either you get one BIG clip file. That's unlike loading DV with the split to clips requested. In the latter case, every time the camera stops and starts shooting a clip the software segregates the preceding as a separate clip file.  There has to be a better way. And there is!

You can download a piece of software that is a free beta, HDSplit version 0.77.  Download it from the following website, among others:

Adventures in HDV

Mon, 01/19/2009 - 12:45pm — milt

I have to admit that I’m still one of those people who does not have a HDTV set. Maybe some day when one of ours goes out, my wife decides to rearrange our living room, or in the most extreme case, they decide to put something of quality on HDTV that I’m interested in.

Since I received my Canon HV-30 I have pretty much been shooting in the DV mode. This was testing and family scenes, the latter of which would end up on a DVD anyway (HDV cannot yet be put on a DVD. Maybe someday when a genius figures how to put short movies on them?). But on a Christmas trip to Texas I went for all HDV shooting (About a tape and a half). The scenes consisted of many, many short clips.

Adobe Premiere Elements Version 7

Tue, 11/25/2008 - 8:42pm — milt

The rains stopped and the moon came out on a recent night lately when a friend gave me a copy of Adobe Premiere 7 to evaluate and spread the word to you.  I eagerly installed it to my HP quad desktop. Prior to this I had used versions 3 and 4 and had just gotten into Premiere Pro CS3. To say that I was disapointed with the changes made by Adobe jumping from 4 directly to 7 (to make a matchup with the CS series numbering) would be an understatement.  If Adobe pushes a new version in the future where sufficient improvements don't merit it you could find yourselves paying out good money just for sheet metal changes over the old chassis and drive chain.

Welcome to Milt's Memos Blog

Mon, 11/10/2008 - 3:46pm — milt

photo of Milt KostnerThis is my first blog entry at this site. Mainly I will write about news for the Multimedia Special Interest Group (MMSIG) in which I am progressing through a 7 month instructional on Adobe's Premiere Elements, followed by one month of Movie Maker. Beyond that, I will be expressing my opinion on subjects of still and video items (software, hardware, etc.) Watch out for the etc.

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by Dr. Radut & Smokers Association